Hintikka's Interrogative Model and a Logic of Discovery and Justification

Hintikka’s InterrogativeActa Model Baltica and Historiaea Logic of et Discovery Philosophiae and JustificationScientiarum Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2015) DOI : 10.11590/abhps.2015.1.02 Hintikka’s Interrogative Model and a Logic of Discovery and Justification Arto Mutanen Finnish National Defence University, Department of Education P.O. Box 7 (Kadettikouluntie 8), Helsinki FI-00861, Finland E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: The relationship between discovery and justification is not clear. According to a standard twentieth-century opinion, in the philosophy of science these two are understood as separate problems: how to recognize and conceptualize the object of study and how to find the justification for the conceptualized belief. How to study the logic of discovery? What kind of logic might such a logic be? The basic observation is that discoveries do not take place in a vacuum. They have to be localized into scientific inquiry processes: a discovery is a discovery only in the context of a scientific inquiry process. To do this we use a systematic logico-philosophical model called the interrogative model of inquiry, which was developed by Jaakko Hintikka. The interrogative model of inquiry allows us to consider the scientific inquiry process as a strategic, goal-tracking process which gives justification for the discovery. The model allows us to formulate a systematic logic of scientific discovery and justification. Keywords: discovery, interrogative model of inquiry, justification, strategic questioning Introduction A goal of scientific inquiry is to attain new knowledge. Moreover, in order to be the most humanly reliable way to acquire new knowledge, scientific inquiry has to be a systematic process. The systematicity needed has to be both institutional and theoretical. The institutional systematicity refers to organizations such Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum 27 Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2015) Arto Mutanen as universities, research institutions, and funding institutions. All these are needed; scientific inquiry or scientific discussion is an actual human practice which takes place in the social reality. Theoretical systematicity refers to the organization of knowledge into theories and to methodological orientation. Scientific knowledge cannot be merely an agglomeration of separate pieces of information. To be scientific, knowledge must be expressed in a systematic way. Nevertheless, what is key is not how the expression is formulated, as this can be either in a linguistic or model theoretic way. Ideally, the formulation should be in the form of a theory (in a strict logical sense). The methodology of scientific inquiry refers to the study of the strategies of acquisition of new knowledge. The topic of the methodology is to characterize the general orientation of inquiry. The structure of scientific theories has been studied extensively, especially by logical positivists. The theoretical background of the studies of logical positivists was the huge development of mathematical logic, as demonstrated in the monumental work Principia Mathematica, written by Russell and Whitehead. Mathematical logic was seen as a central tool in analyzing and expressing scientific theories. Mathematical logic made it possible to systematically study the linguistic structure of scientific theories, especially the axiomatization of theories, which was even recognized as the idealized form of a scientific theory by Aristotle. So, the development of mathematical logic meets the long-term desire of philosophers and scientists, or it seems to have been met. That is, “[t]he result was the original version of the Received View: A scientific theory is to be axiomatized in mathematical logic (first- order predicate calculus with equality). The terms of the logical axiomatization are to be divided into three: (1) logical and mathematical terms; (2) theoretical terms; and (3) observation terms which are given a phenomenal or observational interpretation” (Suppe, 1977, p. 12). Purely observational statements were understood as verifiable with certainty through direct observation. The problem was how to verify general statements that are not verifiable by direct observation. “By means of characterizing the latter, logical positivists attempted to develop an inductive logic” (Suppe, 1977, p. 14). The inductive logic in the sense developed by logical positivism, as “inference from known to the unknown” (von Wright, 1965, p. 1), is something which differs from deductive reasoning. In particular, truth preservation characterizes deductive reasoning but not inductive reasoning. Hence, the problem of validity of inductive reasoning or justification of inductive inferences becomes a central problem. This problem of induction is 28 Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2015) Hintikka’s Interrogative Model and a Logic of Discovery and Justification known as Hume’s problem. However, Hume’s problem is not a proper problem in actual scientific research: “Hume’s problem would play no role whatsoever in a serious theory of the scientific method and of the scientific process” (Hintikka, 1992, p. 25). That is, scientists undertaking actual inquiry do not worry about Hume’s problem, instead they mainly worry about the search for new scientific results. So, “[i]t remains to examine the crucial first question. Surely the first order of business of any genuine theory of knowledge—the most important task both theoretically and practically—is how new information is acquired, not merely how previously obtained information can be evaluated.” (Hintikka, 2007, p. 17) Methodology The ‘genuine theory of knowledge’ is closely related to the methodology of science, which studies the rationality of scientific inquiry in the most general sense. Methodological study includes both the general study of scientific inquiry and special case studies of scientific inquiry. Hence, in methodology we can find out that “there is much diversity of procedures and styles within science” (Feyerabend, 1975, p. 257). It seems quite plausible that science includes different kinds of procedures and styles; this happens between fields of sciences but also within a single field of science. Feyerabend has quite a strict procedure in mind when he speaks about methods in science: “The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research.” In fact, there are no methodological rules which are not broken during actual scientific inquiry. Thus, in the philosophy of science the problem referred to by Feyerabend is only a minor problem, as Feyerabend himself also says, because this practice “is not just a fact of the history of science. It is both reasonable and absolutely necessary for the growth of knowledge.” (Feyerabend, 1975, p. 14.) Marcello Pera (1981, p. 141) says that the “expression ‘scientific method’ is a pollakôs legómenon” which “contains at least three different explicanda” which are (i) a procedure, (ii) a set of rules of conduct, and (iii) a conceptual or operational technique. It is extremely important to separate these different meanings of the notion of method. All of them have a role in the scientific inquiry; however, it is important to map all the different meanings of the notion of method onto Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum 29 Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2015) Arto Mutanen the landscape of inquiry. In this sense, Feyerabend’s basic idea seems to be very interesting: what kind of method does he have in his mind? Or, more generally, what kind of method is a method of discovery? In the philosophy of science, the central problem is not finding a single method, but rather characterizing a general methodological orientation of scientific inquiry, as the Peircean approach demonstrates. For example, general philosophical study explicates how the general demand of explicit argumentation and critical public discussion in scientific inquiry implies that the scientific method is also a self- correcting process (Niiniluoto, 1999). The other example, which is connected to the first, is the problem of scientific discovery. In this paper we consider the problem of discovery using Hintikka’s interrogative model of inquiry. The other approach to the problem of discovery is Peircean abductive logic (Paavola, 2006). Peircean abduction is closely connected to the interrogative model (Hintikka, 2006; 2007). According to the classical definition of knowledge, knowledge is a well-justified true belief. So, knowledge should be both true and justified, which are both very strong constraints which need to be further specified. In fact, inquiry starts from ignorance, and results in knowledge via the inquiry process. The inquiry process gives a justification for the knowledge; hence, it is a learning process which factually generates understanding about the object of inquiry (Hintikka, 2007; Hendricks & Hansen, 2014). This is closely connected toMeno’s problem (Kelly, 1996). Etymologically, ‘understanding’ means standing between differences. How can the inquiry process provide understanding? Unfortunately there are no guarantees of success; there is no method which gives a priori guarantees that the intended goal will be achieved. Scientific discovery is a process that involves a great deal of luck, and which occasionally takes place in science. Fortunately, minor discoveries are more conventional;

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